The present invention relates to a system for selecting a program of a broadcast, for example a television broadcast.
Heretofore, a program reservation system as a program selection system disclosed in a Japanese Patent Application Laid Open 9-322085 is known. The program reservation system is mounted in a television receiver and provided to reserve a program instructed by a user based on the speech recognition of the voice emitted by the user.
The television signal includes program guide information data such as by the multiprocessing. The program reservation system stores names of programs, categories of the programs, broadcasting stations, broadcast time, and others in a memory.
These data are divided into upper rank categories and lower rank categories which are included in the upper categories. The user instructs a desired category by speech. In response to the instruction, the program reservation system reads the category from the memory and displays the data on a display. The user selects a desired data from the display by speech, so that a desired program is reserved in accordance with selected contents.
More specifically, the upper categories such as news, amusement, sports, hobby and culture are displayed. If the hobby and culture is selected, lower categories of the hobby and culture such as fine art, game of go and shogi, cooking, health, and others are displayed. When the fine art is selected, programs relative to the fine art are searched from the memory, and a desired program, the channel of the broadcasting station and broadcast time are reserved. At the broadcast time, the selected program of the fine art is tuned and displayed.
The program data are filed and managed in a simple tree diagram as shown in FIG. 12. Namely, there is employed the file structure wherein data for reserving a program are divided into predetermined fixed upper categories and fixed lower categories and stored, and display contents are sequentially opened from the upper categories to the lower categories, thereby reaching a desired program.
Therefore, even if the user wants to directly select a program included in a lower category, a content of upper conception must be selected from an upper category. Thereafter, the lower category to which the desired program belongs, which causes troublesome operation in particular in the case there is many steps before the end.
Furthermore, in the conventional program reservation system, categories are set in accordance with items determined by the above described program guide information, and programs are sorted based on the categories. As a result, the programs are not displayed so as to meet the requirement of the user, so that the user must operate the system in the fixed pattern. Namely the system is not always good in operability.
An object of the present invention is to provide a program reservation system which enables the user to easily reserve a desired program.
According to the present invention, there is provided a system for selecting a program in a broadcast, comprising, question means for requiring a reply of a user to a question, receiving means for receiving an instruction of the user, recognizing means for recognizing the instruction of the user, selecting means for selecting a program based on the recognized instruction, learning means for storing the instructed and selected program, providing means for providing the instructed program to the user.
The program is a television program, and the providing means is a display of a television receiver.
The system is provided with a remote controller and a remote control signal transmitting and receiving circuit.
The remote controller is provided with an alphabet key for inputting a desired program and a ten key for inputting a channel number.
The present invention further provides a system for selecting a program in a television broadcast, comprising, a display for displaying a question to a user and a television program, receiving means for receiving instruction and reply of the user, recognizing means for recognizing the instruction and reply of the user, displaying means for displaying the instructed program on the display when the instruction is a name of a program, learning means for storing the instructed program.
The display means displays a program on the display when the instruction is stored in the learning means.
The present invention further provides a method for selecting a program in a television broadcast, comprising the steps of, requiring a reply of a user to a question about a program through a display of a television receiver, receiving an instruction of the user in response to the question, recognizing the instruction of the user, selecting a program based on the recognized instruction, storing the instructed and selected program for learning, displaying the instructed program on the display.